ABSTRACT There is now quite a bit of evidence for the general thesis that our perceptual apparatus leaves its mark on the ways that we human beings think and talk about colors. But much remains to be said about the detailed nature of the connections between color perception and color categorization, and it is not at all clear just which questions about cross-culture regularities in the use of basic color terms can be usefully addressed by the methods of visual science and psychophysics. The problem area needs competent collaborative work between anthropologists and linguists on the one hand, and psychologists and visual scientists on the other. This end will be well served by convening, for the first time, a cross-disciplinary working conference on color categorization in thought and language, and its biological underpinnings. The conference will bring six or seven cognitive and linguistic anthropologists together with an equal number of psychologists and visual scientists and half a dozen junior investigators for three days of tutorials and intensive discussion of problem areas. The proceedings of the conference will be transcribed, carefully edited, and published.
